Saturday we went to Wiimbledon, the first-ever Wii tennis tournament at Barcade in Williamsburg. 128 people in various forms of Nintendo plumage, tennis skirts, sweatbands, track suits, and one giant bear costume gathered to compete for eternal glory and a Wii console.

The real show, however, wasn't the tennis so much as the absolute abundance of media coverage. Word is there was 1 camera person for every 3 people.

It seems that increasingly the coverage of an event is more sought than the event itself. Planning the coverage–the outlets for the media streams–is as important as the event. It goes beyond getting good or bad press. We want the coverage itself. We want the words that mean coverage–Gawker, Gothamist. We look forward to the pure digital packets, the looking-in, coverage of coverage, so much so that your experience of an event like Wiimbledon no longer belongs to you. The way you saw it is the least accurate, the least comprehensive.

You didn't really have to go to Wiimbledon to understand exactly what it was like. Maybe it's better even if you didn't go. By actually attending an event you narrow your experience. Perhaps it's better to wait and watch the angles as they crop up on blogs and youtube and flickr. Isn't that the more objective, rounded experience?

Our obsession with instant documentation is already well on its way of draining intensely personal moments of all color, pain, strength, force of life.

In the future events will be pure coverage. Perhaps there will be a small pretense: a man and a woman stand in a bar holding tennis rackets surrounded by photographers, bloggers, camera crews.

The media films the man and the woman, but soon looses interest and begins to simply film each other, the walls, the floor. Eventually we won't even need the pretense of any event and we'll be able to do away with the man and the woman entirely. The coverage becomes the event, or more precisely, the uploading of the coverage, the collection of data points organized into a flickr photo stream. What's in the pictures won't be important. It will only matter that they are beautifully arrayed and that hyperlinks know the way to each photo's url, so that our lives are accessible through a billion pathways we have no knowledge of.

How could we not be losing something through this bitter mapping of our lives? Maybe the Indians didn't fear the camera would take their soul, but that, somehow, they apprehended the more insidious future implications of this technology, that observation instead of experience would become the dominant force, relegating our lives to negligible instances of tear and smile.

For a list of winners and media see Wiimbledon.net.